‘Indian kids as smart as children of US profs’

Lucknow: A three-year-old child in India is just as smart and capable as the son or daughter of a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) or Harvard University. The basis of the revelation is a study on pre-mathematics skills among slum children (3 to 5 years) in Delhi and a batch of children of PhD students or professors in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The performance of both groups was exactly the same, said Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee while delivering a lecture on ‘Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty' at Lucknow University's Malviya Hall, as part of the Mahindra Sanatkada Lucknow Festival, on Monday."We should not think that we do not have talent. We have all the talent we need," said Banerjee, while insisting that the school system often erodes students' confidence by insisting that there was only one correct method to solve a problem. Recalling his own experience, he said teachers objected when he solved problems mentally and demanded step-by-step procedures, a mindset he described as flawed."Doing algorithms is not important; solving problems is important," he said.In his address, Banerjee outlined five pillars that shape poverty outcomes—nutrition, microcredit, education, poverty traps and the impact of small interventions — underscoring the role of evidence from field experiments in designing policy."The first pillar, which is nutrition, is a kind of historic obsession of the development community. In India, for a very long time, we defined poverty through nutrition. We do a nutrition-based understanding of poverty, and I learned the same here," said Banerjee.He said nutrition is something very hard to improve, as it does not improve very much with income. Whether you give people money or grains, their consumption does not change. If you give them grains, they do not spend money to buy grains, and if you give them grains, they do not spend money to buy more for consumption.Citing findings from fieldwork across 147 countries, he said that the assumption that nutrition automatically improves with rising income did not hold.He said better outcomes could come from changing preferences and behaviour, not only incomes.On education, Banerjee referred to his work with NGO Pratham, including a randomised evaluation of the "Teaching at the Right Level" approach aimed at building foundational reading and mathematics skills in primary classes. He said over-ambitious curricula and rigid pedagogy prevent schools from identifying talent and result in limited learning, arguing for easing what he called the "tyranny of curricula".Talking about microfinance, Banerjee said that despite rapid expansion over the past 10–15 years, microfinance remains out of reach for the median borrower, with benefits concentrated among the top 5%. He said microfinance can help some beneficiaries expand businesses but does not, on average, drive a sustained escape from poverty through small enterprises."Failures in social policy are often driven by three factors — intuition, ideology and inertia," he said, and argued that broad prescriptions such as good governance, democracy, rule of law and trade policy are not sufficient by themselves.